The London Guantánamo has been campaigning since 2006 for the return of all British residents from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, the release of all prisoners, the closure of this prison and other similar prisons and an end to the practice of extraordinary rendition. Human rights for all.

The US
administration has announced that 17 prisoners are scheduled to be released in
January, with the first prisoners due to be released in the first week of 2016.
The Kuwaiti parliament has confirmed that a delegation will visit Guantánamo on
5 January to repatriate the last Kuwaiti prisoner Fayiz Al-Kandari, who was
cleared for release a few months ago. The releases will bring the prison
population down to 90. Currently, 48 prisoners have been cleared for release. A
further three prisoners are due to appear before the periodic review board to
determine whether they can released as well. Most prisoners who have appeared
before the board since it recommenced work in late 2013 have been cleared. The first
review will take place on 12 January for Afghan prisoner Haji Hamidullah.

A special report
by Reuters has claimed that the Pentagon has deliberately thwarted Obama’s plan
to close Guantánamo and delay prisoner releases. However, this does not absolve
Barack Obama of his ultimate responsibility to take action to close Guantánamo
Bay, as he has promised since 2008. Nonetheless, during a visit to San
Bernardino, prior to leaving for his Christmas holidays, Barack Obama yet again
affirmed his commitment to close Guantánamo and to go through with his plan to
close the facility (and potentially not end indefinite detention) by possibly
using executive action if Congress fails to approve it.

On 1 December,
Yemeni prisoner, Mustafa Al-Shamiri, 37, appeared before the review board to
consider whether he can be cleared for release. During the review, it emerged
that he had been wrongly profiled by the US military as an al-Qaida
facilitator. The assessment had claimed he had fought in Bosnia in 1995, even
though he would have been 16 or 17 at the time. It appears that his name was
confused with that of other people. He has thus been held on false premises,
like most of the other prisoners, since 2002. A decision on his status has yet
to be made.

Another Yemeni ‘forever’ prisoner Zahir Hamdoun, 36, had his
review board hearing on 7 December, during which his lawyers said that he realized
that it was not possible for him to return to Yemen, and so if he is allowed to
be released to a third country, they are prepared to offer him full support, including
financial assistance, mental health care, etc. He was captured in Pakistan and
handed over to the US in February 2002. The US claims he had been fighting for
the Taleban and had run away. It is likely he was sold to the US by the Pakistani
military. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article48576320.html

On 1st
December, the case of Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, who was convicted by a military
tribunal in 2008 and has since had his conviction overturned twice, had his case
heard by the federal court of appeals for the third time, with the US
government bringing new arguments to try to make the conviction stand. The conviction
was originally overturned over 3 years ago and those decisions have led to
other convictions being successfully appealed. However, if the US government loses
this case again, it will strongly undermine the already weak premise of
military commissions, and ultimately detention, at Guantánamo Bay. Some of the
legal arguments are discussed here:

Former Yemeni
prisoner, Nasser El-Bahri, in his 40s, died in Yemen on 28 December following a
long illness, his family has reported. He was released from Guantánamo without
charge in 2008. The US military claims he was Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard.

In June, the last Mauritanian
prisoner in Guantánamo and best-selling author of Guantánamo Diary Mohamedou
Ould Salahi filed an application in the courts to try to compel the government
to give him an immediate periodic review board hearing for his case to be
reviewed and to consider whether he can be cleared for release. The government
rejected the application and on 18 December the court rejected it too, claiming
that it did not have the jurisdiction to order the government to carry out an
immediate review and did not consider the US government to be impeding Ould
Slahi’s access to his legal papers.

The latest
pre-trial hearing in the case of 5 men accused of involvement in the 9/11
attacks in 2001 took place on 8-11 December, the first military tribunal
hearing for almost 10 months. During the hearing, lawyers for the men presented
a motion for the case to be dismissed given how slowly it is progressing – an
actual trial is unlikely to take place until possibly 2020 – and as statements
made by the US president and his administration make it highly unlikely that
the men will get a fair trial and have already prejudiced the proceedings. Other
issues considered were the use of female guards.

Two US citizens
convicted in Italy for their role in the 2003 rendition to torture of Abu Omar,
a Milan imam, have received a partial pardon from the Italian president. Robert
Seldon Lady, a former CIA agent, had his 9-year sentence reduced to 7 years and Betnie
Madero had her 6-year sentence effectively wiped out. The sentences against 26
US citizens were made in absentia and in 2013 Lady was arrested briefly in
Panama pending extradition proceedings by Italy. The ruling means that Lady and
the other 24 whose convictions stand cannot travel to Europe or they will be
extradited to Italy to serve their sentence. Following the Panama incident,
Lady had asked for a pardon. Abu Omar and his wife currently have a case before
the European Court of Human Rights related to Italy’s complicity in human
rights abuses.

On 1st December,
Human Rights Watch marked the first anniversary of the US Senate’s report into
CIA torture with the publication of a report, No More Excuses, setting
out information about the torture report and a roadmap of what states must do
not to ensure accountability and prosecutions for those involved.

The final Shut
Guantánamo demonstration for 2015 was on Thursday 3 December at 12-1pm outside
the US Embassy, Grosvenor Sq and 1.15-2.15pm outside Speaker’s Corner, Hyde
Park, Marble Arch. There is no monthly demonstration in January. Our next
demonstration in February will mark 9 years of this action.

On 8 December, the LGC
marked the first anniversary of the partial publication of the US Senate’s CIA
Torture Report in December 2014 with a panel discussion focusing on the UK’s
involvement and the personal, community and military ramifications of the use
of torture. We were joined by Head of Doctors at Freedom from Torture Dr Juliet
Cohen and Veterans for Peace UK coordinator Ben Griffin who both made excellent
contributions A report of the meeting can be read here: http://londonguantanamocampaign.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/we-tortured-some-folks-too-event-report.html

Thursday, December 10, 2015

On 8 December, the London Guantánamo Campaign held a public
meeting in cooperation with the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, to mark the anniversary of the publication of the US Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence report (Torture Report) into the CIA’s use of torture under the extraordinary
rendition programme. A heavily redacted 500-page summary of the full 6700 page
report was published on 9 December 2014. The report took 5 years to compile,
details 119 cases from 2002 to 2009 and cost $40 million to produce. Although since
then no more of the report has been made public and there have been no
prosecutions in the USA, the report has provided confirmation and shed further
light of some of the worst forms of physical, sexual and psychological torture
carried out by the CIA this century.

Given its international expanse the programme would have
been impossible without the collusion of at least 54 other states, as detailed
in a 2013 report by the Open
Society Foundations, including the United Kingdom. According to this report
(the 2014 Torture Report does not name any countries): “The U.K. government
assisted in the extraordinary rendition of individuals, gave the CIA
intelligence that led to the extraordinary rendition of individuals,
interrogated individuals who were later secretly detained and extraordinarily
rendered, submitted questions for interrogation of individuals who were
secretly detained and extraordinarily rendered, and permitted use of its
airspace and airports for flights associated with extraordinary rendition
operations.” There are at least two ongoing prosecutions related to information
in the Torture Report.

The meeting focused on torture as a practice, rather than as a policy, the needs of survivors and how it is that the UK has become involved in such practices many times. Indeed, in the same time period, Britain was also involved in
the torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, and claims have
come to light concerning earlier abuses in Northern Ireland, Kenya and Malaya.

Dr Juliet Cohen, Head of Doctors at Freedom From Torture which is celebrating
30 years of rehabilitating torture survivors this year, spoke first about the devastating
impact torture has on the individual affected. She defined torture as per the UN Convention
against Torture, which both the UK and US are signatories to: “any act by
which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally
inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person
information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has
committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him
or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the
consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official
capacity.”

Dr Cohen outlined one such case from Sri Lanka, of the many she has
documented, involving physical and sexual torture by the police, which made
the male victim afraid to seek to medical help for rectal bleeding, impotence,
anxiety and difficulty eating and sleeping as a result and being afraid to
share his experiences as well as triggering difficult memories for him when
encountering objects or sounds that reminded him of his imprisonment. She
described shame and degradation as the most pervasive of the negative emotions
experienced by survivors. The very fact that torture is always carried out law
enforcement personnel - overwhelmingly the police and military - means that
justice is often a closed door.

Nonetheless, it is important to hold perpetrators of such
crimes to account and have prevention mechanisms in place to reduce the
occurrence of such practices. Even so, survivors face challenges in accessing
healthcare for treatment and psychiatric support can be difficult to get.

Dr Cohen noted two particular areas where the UK is failing
in its responsibilities with respect to torture: the ongoing detention of
torture survivors seeking asylum in immigration detention facilities, where
they cannot access the specialists who can provide medical proof of their
claims to support asylum applications, the ongoing distress caused by
this administrative detention as well as the failure
to protect torture survivors through the application of Rule
35 which provides that such vulnerable people should only be detained under
exceptional circumstances. The other
failing is the UK’s evasion of responsibility for torture collusion by seeking
to prevent cases going to court, such as the current case being heard by
the Supreme Court of Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj. Britain is preventing
both individual accountability of those involved as well as criminal
accountability. She stated that the impact of torture is devastating and those
responsible must be held to account.

Ben Griffin, coordinator of Veterans for Peace UK, spoke of his
experiences in the British army. Following 9/11, there was a change in attitude
within the military. Using the analogy of the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, he explained the process of how it is a person comes
to be tortured during war. There is a process of people being arrest,
transported, starved, humiliated, until they are eventually tortured – looking far
more haggled and different to the person who was arrested – and sometimes
killed. The torturer doesn’t see the person taken from their home: he or she
sees the dehumanised shell: the person who has been starved, had their hair shaved,
deprived of sleep, etc. Furthermore, the process is broken down; it is
compartmentalised, so that those involved are only involved in one part of the
process, such as that he was involved in, in Iraq, of arresting alleged
insurgents. Creating a suspect profile also helps to dehumanise those who are
suspected of fitting it.

Prisoners in Iraq, where Griffin served until he left
the army in 2005, were often held by the British military in completely
degrading situations. For example, at Camp Nama, prisoners were held in dog
kennels under the heat of the sun. This compartmentalisation of the brutal
treatment meted out to prisoners makes it easier to evade responsibility for
it.

In addition, soldiers are indoctrinated to act brutally. This
has increased in training methods since World War II, worldwide. Griffin called
on people to celebrate acts of resistance by soldiers to the dominant narrative
of violence being the solution.

Questions and comments were raised about accountability, the
need for a judge-led inquiry in the UK and the inhumane treatment of terrorism
suspects under house arrest in the UK.

Not avoiding the legal issues, Aisha Maniar, LGC
organiser, has produced the following brief summary of outstanding torture
claims against the British government and the progress that has been made over the past year:

Take action!

We hold a regular monthly demonstration calling for the closure of Guantánamo Bay. Our March demonstration is on Thursday 8 March at 12-2pm outside the US Embassy, 33 Nine Elms Ln, London SW11 7US: https://www.facebook.com/events/975903689224552/

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About Me

The London Guantánamo Campaign has been campaigning since 2006 for the return of all British residents from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, the release of all prisoners, the closure of this prison and other similar prisons and an end to the practice of extraordinary rendition. Also on Facebook and Twitter.